Page 100 of Wraith
“That’s it?”
“Honey, I’ve worked here for sixteen years. You think I haven’t seen some shit? Fuck, just three weeks ago, I had to clean out a room that the same guy had occupied for a month. Go in and find a bathtub just full of… Nevermind. Listen, what you’ve got going on is what I call just another Tuesday.”
“So, can you get me out of these?” I say, nodding toward the shackles and the cuffs.
“In about five minutes. But there’s something you need to do first,” she says, and tosses me one towel from the cart.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
“Cover yourself up. We're going to be moving your hands and legs around to get you out of those things — I recognize the stuff they sell at The Love Hole and their shit is quality, let me tell you — and while we’re doing so, I don’t want to catch an eyeful of what you’ve got going on.”
I cover myself. She takes a small metallic tool out of her pocket and gets to work. It doesn’t take her five minutes. It takes three, if that.
The second I’m free, I throw my arms around her, hugging her tight, and whisper, “Thank you,” before I feel the weight of everything, the loss, the betrayal, Wraith’s death, my lonely, heartbroken, New June future, crash into me and a sob that feels like a ball of razor wire claws its way up my throat and I spill an ocean of tears into the housekeeper’s shirt.
Wraith is going to die.
He betrayed me; he tried to control me; he did it deliberately; he didn’t believe in me, despite that, still, there’s a part of me that loves him and I don’t know whether that part is just Old June still giving in to her abusive conditioning, or whether it’s New June having a heart for someone who is broken, flawed, and whether this pain is going to stay with me for the rest of my life.
Am I going to be sitting in my little apartment, years from now, petting my dog, and still feeling the jagged edges of my heart — the edges that don’t quite fit together right because Wraith broke them so wholly that they never will?
“Hey, hey, it’s going to be okay,” she says.
It won’t, but I’d like to believe that maybe, someday, it might not be so bad.
But I can’t answer. Can’t answer except to slow my sobbing just a fraction and do something that feels like nodding, but is really just me rubbing my snotty, tear-streaked face into her shoulder.
“Look, do you have someone we can call? Someone who can come and get you? Because I can’t just sit here all day.”
“My brother.”
“Good. You got a phone around here?”
I gesture toward a pile of clothes in the corner, and the housekeeper leaves me to rummage through it before returning with my phone. She hands it to me. I breathe in once, twice, try to steady my breathing, realize I’m failing at that, and just hit the call button anyway.
Evan answers on the second ring. “Hey June, what’s up?”
“Evan… Evan…”
“Fuck. June, what is it? Are you okay?”
“It’s Wraith…”
“Son of a bitch. What’d he do?”
“I can’t… I can’t… I just need your help. I need you.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Wraith
Facedown against the hardwood, blood pools beneath me, wet, warm, sticky against my cheek. Some of it’s congealed, some fresh, some that weird in-between like Jell-O that hasn’t fully set. It leaks from a dozen places and surprises me — I’m amazed I still have this much left inside me. But it won’t be much longer, now; things that should hurt don’t, and things that should fill me with agony — broken bones, cuts, bruises, the gash above my right eye that feels like someone carved a scale model of the Grand Canyon into my flesh — feel like little more than a dull ache or a low burn.
The only thing that still hurts is my heart.
June was right.
And the only way New June gets to have a chance — just a fucking chance — at New June’s life is if I can hold on long enough for her to work her way out of those fucking handcuffs and get somewhere safe.
